A steady-state irradiation creep and thermal creep model for zirconium alloys

In this work, a mechanistic steady-state creep model is developed to characterize the macroscopic strain rate of metallic materials affected by irradiation flux, testing temperature and applied stress. Thereinto, the steady-state strain rate is obtained by considering the density evolution of mobile dislocations, which involve the mechanisms of dislocation multiplication, dynamic annihilation and time-dependent dislocation annihilation. In order to effectively analyze the irradiation creep behavior in the low and high stress region, main attentions are focused on the influence of dislocation mobility on the process of time-dependent dislocation annihilation. At low stress, dislocation mobility is affected by dislocation climb and thermally activated glide. For the former, the absorption of irradiation-induced point defects can promote dislocation climb; whereas, thermally activated dislocation glide might be inhibited by the existing defect clusters. At high stress, the dominant deformation mechanism changes from dislocation climb to displacement cascade unpinning. For the latter, an explicit formula for dislocation mobility is deduced to address the influence of dislocation unpinning from the barriers on irradiation creep. To further verify the established model, thermal creep and irradiation creep data of zirconium alloys are considered to compare with the theoretical results. A good agreement is achieved over a wide range of temperature and stress indicating that the model can well describe the deformation behavior of steady-state creep. In addition, contribution of the dominant dislocation mobility components and dislocation density evolution components is compared under both thermal and irradiation creep, which can facilitate the comprehension of fundamental creep mechanisms of metallic materials.